Cybersecurity researchers have detailed a malware marketing campaign that is concentrating on Docker environments with a beforehand undocumented approach to mine cryptocurrency.
The exercise cluster, per Darktrace and Cado Safety, represents a shift from different cryptojacking campaigns that immediately deploy miners like XMRig to illicitly revenue off the compute assets.
This includes deploying a malware pressure that connects to a nascent Web3 service known as Teneo, a decentralized bodily infrastructure community (DePIN) that enables customers to monetize public social media information by working a Group Node in alternate for rewards known as Teneo Factors, which might be transformed into $TENEO Tokens.
The node primarily capabilities as a distributed social media scraper to extract posts from Fb, X, Reddit, and TikTok.
An evaluation of artifacts gathered from its honeypots has revealed that the assault begins with a request to launch a container picture “kazutod/tene:ten” from the Docker Hub registry. The picture was uploaded two months in the past and has been downloaded 325 occasions to this point.
The container picture is designed to run an embedded Python script that is closely obfuscated and requires 63 iterations to unpack the precise code, which units up a connection to teneo[.]professional.
“The malware script merely connects to the WebSocket and sends keep-alive pings with a view to achieve extra factors from Teneo and doesn’t do any precise scraping,” Darktrace mentioned in a report shared with The Hacker Information. “Primarily based on the web site, a lot of the rewards are gated behind the variety of heartbeats carried out, which is probably going why this works.”
The marketing campaign is paying homage to one other malicious risk exercise cluster that is recognized to contaminate misconfigured Docker cases with the 9Hits Viewer software program with a view to generate visitors to sure websites in alternate for acquiring credit.
The intrusion set can be just like different bandwidth-sharing schemes like proxyjacking that contain downloading a selected software program to share unused web assets for some form of monetary incentive.
“Sometimes, conventional cryptojacking assaults depend on utilizing XMRig to immediately mine cryptocurrency, nonetheless as XMRig is very detected, attackers are shifting to various strategies of producing crypto,” Darktrace mentioned. “Whether or not that is extra worthwhile stays to be seen.”
The disclosure comes as Fortinet FortiGuard Labs revealed a brand new botnet dubbed RustoBot that is propagating by way of safety flaws in TOTOLINK (CVE-2022-26210 and CVE-2022-26187) and DrayTek (CVE-2024-12987) units with an purpose to conduct DDoS assaults. The exploitation efforts have been discovered to primarily goal the expertise sector in Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Mexico.
“IoT and community units are sometimes poorly defended endpoints, making them enticing targets for attackers to take advantage of and ship malicious applications,” safety researcher Vincent Li mentioned. “Strengthening endpoint monitoring and authentication can considerably cut back the danger of exploitation and assist mitigate malware campaigns.”
